danaleeling

Monday I ran a playlist that covered the planets. Then Wednesday I laid out the solar system on campus. I still believe that is a valuable exercise for pre-teacher prep majors.  Serjean was an early arrival at Uranus. Athina Viola and Milain followed by Ozimy who is carrying the sun. The exercise lays out the solar system to scale on campus, presuming the sun is shrunk down to the size seen in Ozimy's hands. BB shot represents the inner rocky planets, duck marbles are Jupiter and Saturn, "sinai" marbles are Uranus and Neptune. The duck marbles are about 5.2 grams, the smaller "sinai" marbles are 2 grams. 

A review of fall 2022 found that Monday for this unit went long, too long. I trimmed back to just reaching tritium and helium in order to fit in the video playlist on the hydrogen bomb and Eniwetok . A survey of the class suggested that only a few had ever had this material and those few had forgotten the details and definitions. So I proceeded rather slowly as seen above. Covered the element colors, then the atomic number, then the atomic mass and why there are decimal places By 12:32 this was a far as I had gone, including spin in the orbital. As part of the view of the road ahead, I outlined the orbitals.  Then I ran the video playlist  that explains indirectly why tritium matters in Micronesia. Detail view Periodic table on the back wall On Wednesday tropical depression TD 01W had formed south of Pohnpei with potential tracks over Pohnpei. As is the rule in physical science, when a physical science live event impinges on the classroom, that is a teachable moment. I covered...

 Future retrospectives will be puzzled by the variability in page views seen late in the spring 2023 term. The drop in page views in week 13 was due to spring break coinciding with FSM culture day at the end of week 12, college founding day on the Monday of week 13, and a faculty development workshop on Tuesday. This was followed by spring break. Page views on Instructure Canvas came back up in week 14, then in week 15 tropical depression 01W, later tropical storm Sansu, shut down the national and CTEC campuses on Thursday. Both campuses saw very low enrollment the next day.  The result was a drop in page views on Thursday and Friday of week 15.  Of note this past week was the release of New Analytics in the admin console for Canvas. This is actually being run on Looker, which was acquired by Google and which is what this author has been using to produce dashboards. 

The week opened with the MicSem video on alternate energy . With the capabilities of the new SMART board I realized that I could display the labels on electrical devices on the board while working the cost at the front.  The lecture started with the bridge from the micro-hydro alternate energy generation system seen in the video on Monday to electricity. Knowing that we would not have to go outside at the end of the period, I moved more slowly and carefully through the definitions. I had preloaded more devices than I could cover in the class. The photos were loaded into Google Drive. Macro shots of labels made the details very visible in the classroom.  I used the kettle to calculate the cost per hour to have the 1500 W kettle running. This was a slightly different approach than I have taken in the past. I first calculated the cost per hour: 1.5 kilowatts times $0.56 per hour. I used the rate prior to the government subsidy. As usual I wrapped up with the cost for the split a...